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The music before Beethoven was from F to F, the compass of those instruments. Beethoven's later works made use of Broadwood's six octave pianos and in the 1820's (in time for Chopin and Liszt) Broadwood pushed on to the full seven and a half octaves.

Bösendorfer include a few extras in the bass that can be covered by a wooden flap to avoid regular uses from becoming confused by the new keyboard geography.

I have used all 88. If you play a solo arrangement of the Grieg Am concerto, the very first note in the introduction gets down to the bottom A. If you play the recapitulation of the main theme at the end of Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto, you'll get up to the top C. Those are the two that I can think of off the top of my head that did it for me.

However, I know there are many others.. I remember discussing the top end of the keyboard in another thread, and quite a few pieces were mentioned.

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I read recently that there are pianos with more than 88 keys. Being as they would be quite rare, how much music is out there that would require such an exotic keyboard arrangement?

At the dealer that I got my Yamaha, they have a piano with 92 keys, and it's a beautiful piano, and I've gone back several times to play that $129,000 work of art. I am not sure those 3 extra keys in the bass is the reason why the piano sound so great. I'm pretty sure the piano would have been great even without them. I think perhaps it's more a bragging rights kind of thing than anything else, and by the way, when I played those notes, they sound kind of like a dull thud, totally not like you're hearing clear fundamentals. The piano, even at over 7-foot long, just isn't long enough for those bass notes.

I read a few composers including Debussy wrote some music for these pianos, but I think the most practical purpose of having extra notes is to create a richer resonance with the sustain pedal.

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